Who Is PlayPeople's Greatest Risk?
Lee Siwoo stared at his smartphone in awe as he walked home after spending all day grinding free ranked matches with his friends.
The insane spike in herb prices.
The way elixir and potion prices are fucking skyrocketing like they're competing with thousand-gold mounts.
The massive bubble in crafted item prices—it's all because this bastard bought up everything and jacked the prices through the roof, isn't it?
Wouldn't every single problem be solved if this guy would just fuck off from Lost of Fantasy?
This is the first time I've ever seen Playpeople get dragged this hard…
To Lee Siwoo, Playpeople had always been a decent enough company that uploaded pretty useful strategy videos for Legend of League.
He knew their reputation in the community wasn't great, but the guides made things convenient.
“Still… they really don’t have a conscience. Sister Hana did warn me the prices would shoot up like this, but…”
No matter which corner of the gallery you checked.
No matter how deep you went into the Playpeople channel’s comment section…
The public was exploding. The hate ranged from insults about Ghoul King’s parents to brand-new, creative curses no one had ever seen before.
Huh…? Wait, doesn’t that mean Im Ha-rin’s getting called a bitch too?
Lee Siwoo remembered how excited she had been a few days ago buying up elixirs and potions at the auction house and scratched the back of his head.
“Or maybe not? I feel like she did tell me something about it…”
They weren’t particularly close, but the thought of his classmate getting hit with parent-level insults made him oddly worried. He moved his thumb toward the search bar.
“That? Of course Sis told me exactly how to sell them.”
Whatever had happened last night must have been a big deal, because the moment Lee Siwoo walked into the PC bang he fired the question at her.
After all, everyone knew who Ghoul King was.
“There’s a proper way to sell them, Sis?”
“You should never sell something with this kind of shady backstory on your main character.”
It sounded ridiculous, but if you didn’t want to get flamed in the community, you didn’t sell on your main.
“Whoa…”
“Which is why~ our Sis is easily ten times smarter than Ghoul King!!”
Im Ha-rin puffed out her chest with pride, then immediately logged into the alternate character I had told her to create a few days earlier.
“Lee Siwoo, hey. Look at this. This is how noona sold them.”
“You’re not my noona… Holy shit.”
Using the information I had given her, Im Ha-rin had bought every single elixir that was guaranteed to sell.
But because hardly anyone had maxed out their expert professions yet, the total supply was under a hundred units.
That was exactly why Ghoul King could use bots to buy up the rest and inflate the prices.
“Unlike that idiot, I listed all the elixirs on the auction house through an alt account exactly like Sis told me to.”
“Wow…”
“And! When I bought these, they were only three hundred gold each! The cheap ones were going for around two hundred!”
It looked like players still didn’t understand the value of consumables because the game hadn’t reached the stage where people were seriously running the Four Major Dungeons or doing raids yet.
On top of that, expert professions had terrible accessibility. Even if someone got interested in crafting, they usually hit a wall right at the beginning.
“Since Ghoul King is listing them at around a thousand gold, when I put mine up at eight or nine hundred everyone thought it was an amazing deal and bought them all.”
“They weren’t supposed to sell that fast. I also got a little boost from Kang Min-seo’s broadcast yesterday.”
“Hehe, I guess I became a promotional model without even realizing it~ But I made out like a bandit~”
Im Ha-rin flashed a V-sign with her fingers and kept bragging.
“Look, hey! Lee Siwoo! Look at this! I have so much gold!”
“How the hell do you have twelve thousand gold?”
“I used the four thousand I had to buy everything, and once they all sold it ballooned up like this.”
Lee Siwoo grabbed his head with both hands.
“Aaaagh!!! Sis!! I spent a whole week grinding just to make a thousand gold! How does Im Ha-rin make this much?!”
“That’s what I keep telling you—it normally wouldn’t work. The only reason it turned out like this is because Ghoul King acted like a braindead idiot, buying infinitely, inflating prices infinitely, and trying to sell infinitely.”
Even back when I played the original version, no one was stupid enough to pull something like this.
How should I put it… the timing when people realized how important elixirs were and the timing when max-level profession users started selling them overlapped perfectly.
“Normally they would have sold for only about a hundred to a hundred and fifty gold over material cost.”
No matter how good an elixir was.
Even if the effect only lasted two hours at most?
The price shouldn’t have been inflated this badly.
…Was this because the internet culture now was so different from twenty years ago?
“Anyway, don’t go around bragging about the money you made. Spend it slowly and carefully. The community right now is brutal, so don’t even think about asking me to do any real-money trading.”
“Tch, I know that much! How brutal is it… Oh, right! Sis!! Did you see this? Playpeople posted an apology on their channel!”
Im Ha-rin showed us the apology Ghoul King had uploaded, grinning from ear to ear.
Regarding the recent events, we would like to offer our sincerest apologies.
This is Ghoul King, CEO of Playpeople.
We officially apologize for the incidents and accidents that occurred recently in Lost of Fantasy.
First, we acknowledge that Playpeople bears partial responsibility for the rise in elixir and potion prices within the auction house, as many users have pointed out.
However, we wish to clearly state that these were normal trading activities that utilized the game’s free-market economy system. There was absolutely no intention to harm our users.
We simply analyzed market trends, and the prices of the items rose exactly as we had predicted.
Nevertheless, we deeply apologize for ultimately causing inconvenience and a sense of loss to many users.
Playpeople is currently reviewing this matter with the utmost seriousness. We will improve our operations by producing content more carefully to prevent similar controversies in the future and by taking the game’s economy into greater consideration.
Furthermore, we are considering measures—including legal action—against the excessive slander and personal attacks appearing in certain communities.
Once again, we apologize to every user who experienced inconvenience because of this incident.
Thank you.
“Sorry, but if you fuck up once it should end there. Instead he’s dragging out this pride battle to the bitter end…”
Ghoul King’s apology had already been pinned across every community and was being ripped apart nonstop. It was trash among trash.
The outcome of this pride battle was obvious from the start. He had already set every video related to expert professions—videos that had been pulling two or three hundred thousand views—to private.
It was clear that within half a day we would see a second apology that would reach naked-dog-begging levels.
“You need a brain to make money…”
I clicked my tongue, flushed the toilet, and stood up. I opened the stall door and washed my hands without a word.
Seriously, I just couldn’t understand it.
Someone who had risen to the position of company CEO couldn’t have gotten there by playing Go-Stop, right?
“Ah, Sis! Sis!”
Im Ha-rin, who had been waiting for me to emerge from the bathroom like a golden retriever, waved her hands wildly from her seat on my right.
Lee Siwoo, sitting on my left, was burning with frustration while continuing his daily grind.
“Kang Min-seo’s been looking for you! Hurry, hurry~!”
“Why again? Weren’t we supposed to farm the lower layers today?”
I hadn’t planned on this at all.
Before I knew it, I had somehow ended up farming with three different streamers every single day.
Maybe it was because my combat power was high. There were definitely other streamers raising healers, but they never called those people.
“That’s right, but Sky started whining that Bitcoin prices dropped so he didn’t know whether to sell or not, so we decided to take a ten-minute break.”
“Yeah, that’s why I went to the bathroom.”
“But! While you were gone, Ramjwi Thunder found something!”
Im Ha-rin grinned.
“What did he find?”
I sat down in front of my computer and assessed the situation.
The only difference from before I went to the bathroom was that another party was now loitering around the dungeon entrance…
“In the upper floors of the Spire! There’s a mob that drops an insanely good trinket for DPS!!!”
“You mean the Stinging Tree Stalk?”
“Huh? Wait, what? Sis, how did you know?”
Im Ha-rin, who had been making a fuss, covered her mouth with her left hand.
“To get that you need to do the quest… Well, it’s a good trinket for me, for Ramjwi Thunder, and for you too.”
There were also items in it for me.
Sky’s haul would be basically department-store level, and both Im Ha-rin and Ramjwi Thunder had plenty of things they could use.
“But today’s going to be tough.”
“Why? Your combat power is high! I got some gear last time so my damage is decent now! Everyone’s using elixirs too, so it should be fine, right?”
“That’s the thing…”
Just as I was about to explain, a message from Kang Min-seo popped up.
“Looks like she already made up her mind while I was in the bathroom.”
“Sis, Sis. Let’s go~ They’re giving out good stuff! You said we have to do the Four Major Dungeons anyway, right? Shouldn’t we go?”
“Of course it’s good to go. But…”
“Oh, damn… So that’s why there was another party at the dungeon entrance?”
“Looks like it, Sis. Then there’s no problem, right?”
“No, the fundamental reason I said it would be difficult is…”
“Uh… really? We can’t go in?”
“Yeah, the door won’t even open so we can’t—”
“A~h! Mister Knight! I can’t believe you thought I was the kind of guy with zero sense!”
…Wait, what?
“Whoa… What! Sis! Sis! Let’s go! We have ten people! We have the key! Let’s run the upper floors! Okay?”
“Well… if it’s like this, I guess we have no choice.”
It was obviously going to be a total wipe, but I could just guide them through it.
Thinking optimistically, I changed the party into a raid. What waited for me was a wipe so legendary it would be talked about on the internet for years.